BACK TO BASICS[Info provided by:Tom Brunt]
Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner scripted the first RoboCop film and are back for the TV series. The concept of RoboCop:The series originated with a discarded script Neumeier and Miner wrote as a sequel to the first ROBOCOP film.

IN THE SHADOWS OF DELTA CITY
The first hit ROBOCOP film created an enduring franchise for Orion Pictures. The second film didn’t perform as well. It received a critical drubbing. The third film barely registered at the box office.
None of that mattered. The series was established. Foreign markets wanted more Robo-product.

During the production of the original ROBOCOP film in 1986, co-writer Ed Neumeier discussed the premise of what would turn into a successful series.

Ed Neumier: “This all came out of the fact that I discovered comic books when I was twenty-four. I discovered that there was a new wave of comic books coming out. So it was sort of adolescent, but it was consistently that. Then as we went through subsequent drafts it became a little more sophisticated. The dialogue became more sophisticated. We tried to get motivations for these people instead of just acting out of adolescent rage. I was a story analyst and a reader for five years. I worked as a ‘creative executive’ on a lot of pictures, but this is the first script I really sat down and wrote since I was in film school at UCLA.
Everything that was done with my approval, more or less. Approval is a funny word because when you’re in production and everybody’s hysterical, screaming about money, you just go, ‘All right, if we can’t do this then let’s do that’. So my sense of the movie is that it’s everything that we could make it, under the circumstances, and what I wanted to see out of the picture as much as possible. So I’m, on the whole, very happy about it. I think that if you don’t like this movie, then you don’t like the movie I set out to write because I think its very much that.”

WRITERS CONCEPTEd Neumeier: “It goes back to the first one in that the relationship with OCP. The way OCP was cast, was much more the way it was in the first movie. Even though they were sort of bad executives, ultimately the Chairman, old man the movie, was a benevolent tyrant. We never got into this kind of world where there’s good cops and bad cops and corporate policemen who are hurting homeless people. That seemed to be a little too sticky for what is essentially a sope show. That’s never been very interesting to me.”

Michael Miner:“We always felt RoboCop was a lonely hero who could not express who he is. The television series is an opportunity to explore the ethical honing of RoboCop’s character against a more science fiction-like setting.”

Ed Neumeier:“ROBOCOP is also a comedy, social satire in the broadcast sense. We were always thinking about the next crazy character, place name, or situation which would pillory our existing institutions.”
Neumeier says ROBOCOP takes place at the time of the second industrial revolution. He believes we are just starting to enter this stage in the world’s cultural evolution.